India Telecom

November 17, 2005
Decision time for ITS officers

NEW DELHI -- For some 2,000 officers of the Indian telecom service (ITS) who have been working with the two PSUs BSNL and MTNL, it has not been a festival time in the last few weeks.

The government has told them that the ITS stands abolished and either they should chose to be absorbed into the executive cadre of the respective public sector firms they are working with or go into the surplus officers pool. The latter option would be simply waiting to be given the red slip sooner rather than later.

“It is a painful order for us to implement,” said a very senior officer of the government on the day the order was issued. Most of the ITS officers have not accepted the options that the government had given. As a result, they were all reverted to the government from the PSUs leaving the BSNL/MTNL virtually without anyone to man the executive posts.

The government’s stand is that it has no need of any ITS cadre now that all the telecom services earlier handled by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) have been corporatised. Therefore, it could not retain the ITS officers. The government gave some incentives to the officers to join the PSU cadre including a minimum 25 percent increases in emoluments.

ITSA, the association of these officers is not satisfied by the government’s offer. Going into the PSU cadre would convert them from being officers of the government of India to executives of the PSUs. The government has offered pro-rata pension, but the officers are concerned over the years ahead for which they would get no pension benefits. They lose not only the status of a government officer but also the protection of the umbrella of security of service that they were expecting when they joined the service.

Some of the officers in Uttaranchal and Assam got a respite through a stay from the respective High Courts. The government failed to get the stay vacated through the apex court. However, the stay does not apply on an all India basis as the High Courts have only jurisdiction in the territories assigned to them. ITSA appears convinced that Government would come down and improve the offer it has given. It is pressing for more negotiations at the time of writing.

The senior-most former ITS man S.M. Agarwal, who retired a couple of years ago as secretary of the DoT and even afterwards served the government in many positions told Convergence Plus, called for greater accommodation on the part of both the parties. The ITS was constituted to run telecom services when they were a department of the government. With their transfer to two corporations, there was obviously now work for telecom officers in government. However, he urged the government to consider absorbing a number of these officers in the other administrative and technical services like IAS where their experience as government servants for years could be of use. “The doors should not be closed to them,” Agarwal said. But the rest should consider themselves as part of the PSUs and seek their future in these corporations.

According to some other former retired ITS officers, the die was cast long back when the government decided to liberalise the telecom sector and let private sector enter it breaking the government monopoly of it. In the new competitive environment, ITS officers should have foreseen that the service could not be run as a departmental undertaking. It is recalled that the rest of the employees of the former DoT had already got themselves absorbed into the corporate service, even though they too protested against this change in the beginning.

When the telecom policy was recast in 1994, the then Telecom Commission chairman N. Vittal suggested that the ITS officers be given the option to join the new private telecom companies that had emerged to run telecom services. The government should give the ITS option to join private service with a lien on their service retained by the government for three years.

However, only a handful of the ITS officers took the plunge to resign from the government and face the uncertainty of private sector employment. The government also did not relax the rule for them to join private service. The latter went about recruiting freshers from the engineering colleges and business schools. Many of the service companies outsourced their network building and maintenance operations to third parties. Vittal said then that there would be increasing scope for taking up such work on contract and former DoT employees could form co-operatives or pool their resources to float their own companies to do the work for private parties. However, apparently the ITS cadre was not prepared for such risky ventures.

BSNL is operating from the advantage of the first mover and its existing vast network reaching up to the interior. But the private sector is offering a range of content and services that might fox the BSNL. So far, BSNL has held its head above water in the mobile service. The real test would come when the service is extended to more rural areas and provides broadband. As BSNL has most of the copper wires on which broadband could be provided, it is an added advantage. It has refused to share its network with the private sector and Government has sided with it rejecting the regulators’ recommendation for sharing of the infrastructure. This enables the BSNL to retain its advantage in the competition with the private sector. But the private sector is catching up leveraging the plentiful of fiber already available. The ITS officers opting for BSNL or MTNL would have a tough time competing with the more agile private sector counterparts.